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finally queen hatched

Just as I suspected, one of the queens will be hatching either today or tomorrow on 3/22-23. Maybe this one was a 2 days old larva. I check on 3/19 but found no hatch queen yet.
Tonight at 1:45am 3/22, I felt something not right. At first I didn't know what to do with 4 hives waiting for the new queen to emerge. Juggling with 4 hives made my head dizzy on which frames go with which hives. I need to set up one hive for their orientation flight tomorrow morning while waiting for the soon to be queen to hatch. So I went out there to set up my hive at 1:45am. I took a new hive reduced it to 3 frame box. Then took 2 frame of bees from the split hive and one frame of bees from the original hive with a queen cell on it. As I was looking thru this one frame, I found out that the queen cell had a hole in it that one of the workers had went inside. Curious, anxious and excited, I try looking for the potential hatched queen bee. I knew she was there somewhere but not sure on which frame. Then I looked at the other side and found her crawling along with the other newly hatched worker bees. Surprised I found her! She is not little but not really big either with a long body. She is golden Italian more yellow than her Mother queen bee. Everything is in tact with nothing missing on her. Now I supposed that she will do her orientation flight within one week, eh? Wish me luck that she will returnall mated. One down and 3 more to go!

p.S. With the homemade wire cage, I did caged the other 2 qc almost 3 but thinking one can be left uncage since this hive not has a queen yet. Those bees do defend their queens aggressive crawling all over my gloves in the dark. They moved very fast and never gave up fighting. Would not let me cage their queens.

Re: finally queen hatched

Yes, I got desperate knowing the queen calendar was right on target. If I don't split the hive then the next
day she would of kill off the other queen cells in the same hive. I had 4 more of them on 2 frames. Luckily, I caught her that night to do a split. I only had a veil on with a red LED miner's light. These are the gentle type bees. Also, the next day another one hatched and trying to chew off the one queen cell. I got to her also and made another split. Then I put mini wire cages around the 2 unhatched cells. I'm able to save all of those big queens. They are made from the 5 years old black combs that I have to cut the top off with a scissor to expose the notched eggs. It was more of the supercedure queen cells.